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About The Walrus

The Walrus was founded in 2003. As a registered charity, we publish independent, fact-based journalism in The Walrus and at thewalrus.ca; we produce national, ideas-focused events, including our flagship series The Walrus Talks; and we train emerging professionals in publishing and non-profit management. The Walrus is invested in the idea that a healthy society relies on informed citizens.

The Walrus publishes content nearly every day on thewalrus.ca and ten times a year in print. Our editorial priorities include politics and world affairs, health and science, society, the environment, law and justice, Indigenous issues, business and economics, the arts (including music, dance, film and television, literature, and fiction and poetry), and Canada’s place in the world.

Based in Toronto, The Walrus currently has a full-time editorial staff of fifteen, and we work with writers and artists across Canada and the world. Our masthead can be found here.

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The Walrus is operated by the charitable, non-profit Walrus Foundation, which is overseen by a board of directors, with the support of a national advisory committee and an educational review committee. The foundation’s revenue comes from multiple sources, including advertising sales, sponsorships, circulation, donations, government grants, and events. More than 1,500 donors and sponsors supported The Walrus in 2017.

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The Walrus is committed to reporting that is fair, accurate, complete, transparent, and independent.

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Stories that appear in The Walrus and thewalrus.ca are fact-checked. Our fact-checkers verify everything from broad claims made by authors to small details, such as dates and the spelling of names. Fact-checking records at The Walrus are archived in storage once a story is published.

The Walrus counts on its writers to make independent evaluations of difficult topics. The best journalism—no matter how descriptive, opinion driven, or narrative driven—is based on facts, and those facts should be clearly presented in the story. The Walrus is committed to ensuring the validity of an argument and finding balance between various perspectives on any given issue, while keeping in mind the reliability and motivations of individual sources.

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As soon as The Walrus is made aware of an error, fact-checkers will review the statement in question. Any needed corrections will be noted online at the bottom of the article—and in the next print issue, if the error originally appeared in print. The correction will reference the original error and supply the correct information and the date.
If you notice an error in something published by The Walrus, please send us a message at web@thewalrus.ca with the subject line “Correction.”

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The Walrus allows the use of alternate names for real people only in cases involving legitimate safety concerns or where personal privacy must be protected for serious reasons. If the name of a subject or source is already public and associated with specific events, concealment may not be justified. We will be diligent in explaining a veiled source’s credibility, as much as possible without disclosing their identity, and in explaining why they have remained anonymous.

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Journalism at The Walrus is produced independently of commercial or political interests. The editorial staff and writers do not accept gifts, including paid travel, in order to avoid any conflict of interest or appearance thereof. When a writer relies on an organization for access to an event or product, we are transparent about the relationship and note it within the relevant work. We also cite potential conflicts of interest—and, where applicable, credit funding sources—on the same page as the relevant work.

Contributors or writers are contractually obligated to disclose practices that may deviate from the ethics policy of The Walrus to our editorial team.

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The Walrus maintains a style guide, which is regularly reviewed and updated to reflect current conversations about culture and terminology.

For any situation not covered by this policy, we refer to the Ethics Guidelines of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

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Inclusiveness is at the heart of thinking and acting as journalists—and supports the educational mandate of The Walrus. Race, class, generation, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and geography all affect point of view. The Walrus believes that reflecting societal differences in reporting leads to better, more nuanced stories and a better-informed community.

The Walrus is committed to employment equity and diversity.

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“Here come those men that I dislike.” These words, from a young girl in Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s excellent new drama Timbuktu, neatly encapsulate a film portraying the takeover of a village in Mali by an Islamist militia. (The events in the film are fictional, but inspired by the 2012 occupation of Timbuktu by Islamic fundamentalists). Twelve-year-old Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed) lives on the outskirts of the city with her mother and father, who project a casually wary vibe about the intruders in their midst. As the film goes on, their apprehension increases. They caution their daughter to keep her distance. But it’s clear that maintaining any kind of separation is difficult when a whole community is overrun by religious extremists with guns.

Driving through the narrow city streets in jeeps, brandishing semi-automatic weapons and Shariah law edicts, the jihadists preside over the city as authoritarians. We learn that they’ve banned soccer, leading to an unforgettable sequence in which a group of boys pantomime an entire game—a co-operative group fantasy that recalls nothing so much as the imaginary tennis game in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cult classic Blow-Up. In that film, the choice to play with an invisible ball was an intriguing mystery; here it’s an act of defiance.

Sissako, who always has balanced his social conscience with a stridently comic sensibility, frames the Islamists as figures of fear, but also of mockery. If they suspect that the village’s inhabitants are abusing them behind their backs, it’s because they are. In the best of Timbuktu’s many subtle visual jokes, one of the group’s leaders, a severe-looking man in his forties, is shown being taught how to drive by a much younger comrade, and ends up doing doughnuts all over the dunes—like a nervous teenage boy trying to get his learners’ permit.

At this particular cultural moment, with journalists and artists of all stripes agonizing over the best way to challenge religious fundamentalism in popular media, Sissako’s film (which is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this month’s Academy Awards ceremony, and competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year) seems like a bold stroke. In a review of Timbuktu for Tablet, J. Hoberman points out that the same week in January that Charlie Hebdo was restocked on Parisian newsstands following the murder of its staff members by Muslim-identified gunmen, Timbuktu was yanked from movie theatres in the Parisian suburb of Villiers-sur-Marne on the grounds that it offered “an apology for terrorism.”

It was a foolish edict—handed down, movie unseen, by the district’s mayor. But the episode also shows how difficult it is to depict Islamists with the nuance required of sophisticated, character-driven filmmaking.

One major talking point for members of the left in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders was that the magazine’s stated commitment to satirical fearlessness—for scribbling truth to power, one bug-eyed caricature at a time—dovetailed a little too closely with xenophobic attitudes in France and the rest of Europe toward its Muslim population. By prodding and mocking the actions of religious extremists, the magazine was painting a diverse set of religious and ethnic subcultures with the same thick-bristled brush, in effect redoubling the sense of exclusion and condescension that create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.

Timbuktu—a North African film by a North African director shot entirely on location—cannot be taken up on such charges. In scene after beautifully measured scene, Sissako and his camera look past the Islamists’ self-applied suits of armor—the long black cloaks and sunglasses that cloud their countenances along with their motives. He presents them as mockable man-children prosecuting a violent ideology they don’t really understand (and in one vignette featuring a young man struggling to articulate his piousness for the purposes of a recruitment video, it’s implied that not everyone in the group is a true believer).

Timbuktu’s title and ancient backdrop frame its present-tense tale as a parable, with a cradle of Muslim civilization transformed into a hotly contested battleground between repressive zealots and civilians. The intruders deform custom under the guise of upholding it; a sequence where they use ancient idols for target practice resembles the most sadly eloquent of the cartooned responses to the Charlie Hebdo killings, by the Brazilian Carlos Latuff—in which the bullets fired into the magazine’s offices rip through its walls to strike the mosque next door.

Latuff and Sissako are making the same point: Islamist terrorists may believe they’re ridding the world of infidels. But in reality, they’re disgracing the religious civilization they purport to hold dear—an act of collateral damage that Timbuktu frames sadly and wisely as a timeless tragedy.

About the Author(s)

Adam Nayman is a contributing editor for Cinema Scope. He has also contributed to the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Cineaste.

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